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Friday, April 27, 2012

As Pujols struggles, Angels sink quickly in AL West

We all said, before the 2012 season started, that no park could hold Albert Pujols. It turns out, so far, that they every park can hold him.

By BILL PETERSONBig Leagues in LA

Albert Pujols had never batted at Angel Stadium when the Angels signed him last winter for ten years and $240 million, knowing he would play half his games there. It never occurred to anyone that it should make a difference. We all said no park could hold Pujols, and many went so far as to suggest that the addition of Pujols would paper over all the club’s other ills and produce a pennant.

The Angels ended a 2-4 home stand against Oakland and Baltimore on April 22. Opening the season, the Angels lost two of three at home to Kansas City. While the Angels struggled at home against mediocre competition, their prize acquisition went homerless in 70 plate appearances at his new home park.

Balls that flew out of Busch Stadium went to die in front of the 387-feet sign marking left-center field at the Big A. The only deeper mark in straight left center is Coors Field, situated in Denver's thin air. A mile above sea level, the hitter must reach all the way out to 390 feet in that direction.

The right-handed hitter's power field in Anaheim not only is all but the most spacious in the game, but it is also the thickest. The ocean cools a surface layer of air over the coast at night and kills fly balls. Torii Hunter said the marine layer was going to get Albert a time or two, and it has.

But it's not just the marine layer keeping Pujols in the park. Pujols also has played this year at Target Field, Yankee Stadium and Tropicana Field without homering in any of them. Pujols is homerless in his first 19 games with the Angels, and now his power outage has become a general slump, one-for-22 since a three-hit night against Oakland on April 19. He’s batting .224 with one go-ahead hit all year.

He'll try to break out of it tonight in Cleveland. The Indians have been terrible at home, 2-6 and down more than two runs per game. The head-to-head results tell us that the Tribe has squeaked a few out against Kansas City, Oakland and Seattle, but is not on equal terms with the Chicago White Sox, and certainly not with the Toronto Blue Jays. The 9-8 Indians are tied with Detroit and Chicago on top of the AL Central. Of those teams, Detroit has been most weighted down by a heavy schedule, going 6-4 against Boston, Tampa Bay and Texas.

But the Tigers are reeling right now, losing six of their last seven. They were a fat and happy 9-3 after sweeping three at Kansas City. Then they went home and ran into a club that really means business, the Texas Rangers, who immediately dealt them 10-3 and 10-4 drubbings. The Tigers and Rangers split a pair of 3-2 games to finish the series, but Detroit's damage carried over to a visit from the light-hitting Seattle Mariners, who outscored the home club 21-9 in a three-game sweep.

The Angels were supposed to be better than all those clubs, including, perhaps, Detroit. Instead, they're 6-13 with their only series win coming against Baltimore at home. Just now, Tampa Bay pitched all over the Angels at Tropicana Field, holding them to five runs in three games. The Angels' only good hitter right now is their man without a position, Mark Trumbo. Except for Jared Weaver and C.J. Wilson, the pitching staff has been disappointing.

The Rangers are the team the Angels need to beat in the AL West, but it seems now that no team can beat the Rangers, who are 15-4 overall and 7-2 in games against the Yankees, Red Sox and Tigers. The Rangers have won every series they have played, and they have won them all decisively. They're blowing teams out -- 5-0 in games decided by five or more runs. The Rangers are at home this weekend against 12-7 Tampa Bay, the best of the AL East power trio so far.

After the Tampa Bay series, the Rangers go on a ten-game trip through Toronto, Cleveland and Baltimore before meeting with the Angels for three games in Arlington May 11-13. The road is long, but the Rangers should be good for at least a break-even trip against the league’s bottom half before seeing the Halos.

After leaving Cleveland, the Angels will play ten games against the Twins and Blue Jays before meeting Texas. Already down nine games to the Rangers in the AL West, the Angels need to accomplish a lot in these next 13 games before their dates in Arlington. They need to win nine of them, hoping to pick up a couple games on the Rangers before they play each other. Then, if the Angels can capture some kind of mastery over their rivals, perhaps with a sweep, they would be finally over .500, they would have announced to the Rangers that they're still around and they would be within shouting distance. This season would start to look a lot more like it was supposed to look.

That’s a long way for the Angels to get back even close to where they started. But if the Angels can’t cover it quickly, then it will turn out that their great hope for 2012 is not the addition of Pujols, but the addition of a fifth wild card berth for the playoffs.

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About LA Big Leagues

Bill Peterson is an award winning journalist who has covered sports around the country for more than 30 years, including Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and major collegiate sports for daily newspapers and major wire services. His longest stint was with The Cincinnati Post from 1986-1998. He also has worked at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Miami Herald. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Sporting News and Baseball America, among other publications. He later produced successful public interest newspapers and websites in the Austin/San Antonio area. Peterson is a lifetime member of the Baseball Writers Association of America, formerly with a vote for the Hall of Fame. He can be contacted by email at bill@labigleagues.com.